The Most World's Important Unanswered Historical Question: 'What Changed in 1800?' by Gary North Recently by Gary North: Why Economists Love the Federal Reserve The economic historian Gregory Clark summarizes a remarkable fact. . . . there is no sign

The Most World's Important Unanswered Historical Question: 'What Changed in 1800?'

by Gary North

Recently by Gary North: Why Economists Love the Federal Reserve

The economic historian Gregory Clark summarizes a remarkable fact.

. . . there is no sign of any improvement in material conditions for settled agrarian societies as we approach 1800. There was no gain between 1800 BC and AD 1800 – a period of 3,600 years. Indeed the wages for east and south Asia and southern Europe for 1800 stand out by their low level compared to those for ancient Babylonia, ancient Greece, or Roman Egypt.

Then, around 1800, this all changed. Economic growth began: about 2% per annum, compounded. That brought our world into existence.
We are the great beneficiaries of a process that few people understand. No one has explained cogently how it came into existence. A rate of growth so slow that no one could perceive it at the time has created a world that would have been inconceivable in 1800.
This change has taken a mere three generations. This is simply inconceivable.
My daughter gave me a great Christmas present in 2010. She scheduled an appointment for me to interview a man in her church. His name is Lyon Tyler. My daughter grew up in a city named after his grandfather: Tyler, Texas. His grandfather was John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States. He signed the law that admitted Texas into the Union in 1845.
John Tyler was born in 1790, the first full year of Washington's Presidency.
Lyon Tyler's younger brother, also alive, uses the ultimate one-upsmanship one-liner I have ever heard. After chatting for a while with a stranger, he springs it on him.

"As my grandfather once said to Thomas Jefferson. . . ."

You can try to top that one. You won't succeed.
In 1889, the first volume of Henry Adams' history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison appeared. Adams was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams. He began his book with this paragraph.

According to the census of 1800, the United States of America contained 5,308,483 persons. In the same year the British Islands contained upwards of fifteen millions; the French Republic, more than twenty-­seven millions. Nearly one fifth of the American people were negro slaves; the true political population consisted of four and a half million free white or less than one million able-bodied males, on whose shoulders fell the burden of a continent. Even after two centuries of struggle the land was still untamed; forest covered every portion, except here and there a strip of cultivated soil; the minerals lay undis­turbed in their rocky beds, and more than two thirds of the people clung to the seaboard within fifty miles of tide-water, where alone the wants of civilized life could be supplied. The centre of population rested within eighteen miles of Baltimore, north and east of Washington. Except in political arrangement, the interior was little more civilized than in 1750, and was not much easier to penetrate than when La Salle and Hennepin found their way to the Missis­sippi more than a century before.

The world of 1800 would have been recognizable to Socrates, except for the printed book. In contrast, the world of 1889 would not have been recognizable to the young John Tyler........................
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Gunny G: BLOGGER 1984+ @Blogspot.com
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"A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored; Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. "
~John Adams
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